Vivid Sydney 2013 just wrapped up in Sydney, Australia – I mean like on the tenth of June wrapped up. Vivid Sydney 2013 is a celebration of light around the Sydney Operahouse, and really all around the city!

This year, P&O Cruises took their beauty of a sea vessel, the Pacific Pearl, out for a spin with one small exception — projections all over the boat. You have GOT to see this!

The Light sculpture Forms in Nature resembles Darwinist Ernst Haeckel’s drawings . Using a simple action, such as intensifying the brightness at the center of the artwork, the light transforms the space and adds character, as the work throws oversized shadows onto walls and ceilings in the space in which it hangs. The light sculpture Forms in Nature is partly inspired by Ernst Haeckel’s (1834-1919) detailed plots from nature and is a further development of Hilden & Diaz’ fascination with mirrorings, as they have previously applied in other artworks.

Forms in Nature is a artwork with a light source surrounded by a dense and unruly tree and root system created in minature sculpture. The forest is mirrored around it’s horizontal central axis and forms a circle 360 degrees around the light source and thereby leads one onto the notion of a real world versus an underworld. Interestingly, the roots are those elements of the forest that are the most visible. Thereby the sculpture is not only mirrored, but also turned upside down in Hilden & Diaz’ artwork. As the intensity of the light source increases, the room changes and the space slowly becomes more and more fascinating and unheimlich.

The shadows engulfs the room and transforms the walls into unruly shadows of branches, bushes and gnarled trees. Mirrorings are thrown out upon the walls and ceilings and provide weak Rorschach-like hints of faces, life and flow of consciousness. Diming the lights transforms the installation and one senses a weak fire burning deep in the center of the forest.

Two french directors, Marc Czerwiec and Vivien Testard have used light to paint a beautiful short film in “Light Rhapsody.” Projection designed around a model’s body wraps it–and it is gorgeous! I’ve included a couple stills from the video below.

I highly encourage checking out the video, but I have taken the tame path and not embedded it here given their use of a nude model could be construed as Not Safe For Work. (Though I haven’t seen a Severe Period Greek sculpture blog saying Myron’s Discobolus is NSFW!)

Romain Tardy and Thomas Vaquié are the creating artists on this one — from the AntiVJ Blog:

Last year, we were approached to create our first permanent installation for the new museum of architecture of Hala Stulecia, in Wroclaw, Poland. The piece – that we called O (Omicron), is actually the last part of the visit, and a way to create a link between the rich history of the building and the present times, by turning this massive concrete structure into a lively architecture.

When opened, Hala Stulecia was the largest reinforced concrete structure in the world. With a diameter of 65m it was home to the largest dome built since the Pantheon in Rome eighteen centuries earlier.
The Centennial Hall was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006.

It is reasonable to think that when Hala Stulecia was built in 1913 Max Berg’s ambition for his construction was to pass the test of time. What could have been his vision of the monument in the distant future? How did he imagine the olding of the materials? The evolution of the surrounding urbanism and populations?

The piece proposed for the Centennial Hall of Wroclaw is based around the notion of timelessness in architecture, and the idea of what future has meant throughout the 20th century.

Taking the 1910’s as a starting point (the dome was erected in 1913), historical and artistic references were used to reveal the architecture of the space, its timeless and, more surprisingly, very modern dimension.

This building is called the Hala Stulecia (Centennial Hall); it’s a Max Berg structure, built when the German Empire was still owner of the city of Wrocław. Here’s the structure in a way that makes us lighting designers more comfortable, with truss and chain motors in it:

This building is amazing:

When opened, Hala Stulecia was the largest reinforced concrete structure in the world. With a diameter of 65m it was home to the largest dome built since the Pantheon in Rome eighteen centuries earlier. The Centennial Hall was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006. Taking the 1910’s as a starting point (the dome was erected in 1913), historical and artistic references were used to reveal the architecture of the space, its timeless and, more surprisingly, very modern dimension.

A deliberately minimalist visual aesthetic allowed to highlight the very architecture of Hala Stulecia’s dome and re-affirm its place at the core of the piece.

Take a pico projector, add an iPhone feeding it some content, and film the whole thing with some fun music, and you have a pico projector cop chase. You also have a handful of awesome:

GAH! Sweet. The film is from The Theory and Nexus Productions — from the Vimeo site:

The world’s smallest all action police chase…

Directed By The Theory

The tiniest police chase ever seen, made using the world’s smallest ‘pocket video projectors’. Featuring an escaped convict, a determined cop and a fully armed police helicopter, Speed of Light takes ‘projection mapping’ to a whole new (and low) level.

Speed of Light was all projected and filmed FOR REAL – there’s no CGI trickery.

– The car and helicopter are toys bought from a model shop filmed against greenscreen.
– As well as using the world’s smallest projectors from MicroVision, we also partially filmed using the world’s smallest HD camera.

I wonder how long it’ll be before every iPhone and iPad has the ability to project video in HD? I can’t believe it’s going to be THAT long… look how well Flip HD did once smart phones upped their megapixels! These pico projectors are pretty cool, though. If I were going to buy my own projector, it’d have to be one of those monster Christie projectors. Rawrrrrrrrrr…..

Thanks, LikeCool! PS, that projector up top there is the Vivitek Qumi Q2 3d-ready pico projector — about $500 bucks USD.

You might have been to Chicago, and you might have seen Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate. But you’ve never seen Cloud Gate in Chicago like this before…

Luftwerk is the firm who designed and coordinated this work — a husband/wife team of Sean Gallero and Petra Bachmaier. From Frame Mag’s website:

Luminous Field comprises of 10 video projectors mounted on four towers; the projectors are pointed onto and below Cloud Gate, a giant bean-shaped sculpture built by Anish Kapoor in 2006.

A series of 5-minute-long video shows play on a loop, covering the sculpture and its surrounding territory (about 25-by-9m). Videos range from a funky disco dance floor to colourful geometric patterns.

‘We really perceive it as something that people can interact with,’ says Petra Bachmaier, who forms Luftwerk alongside husband Sean Gallero. ‘We really want people to go in and play with it. Like the whole concept of the video, we built it for people to move with the light.’

The result is a virtual ‘playground’ for people to follow and engage with light. Meanwhile, a special music soundtrack plays, as composed by Owen Clayton Condon of Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion.

“If anything could possibly top the interactive experience of Anish Kapoor’s monumental Cloud Gate sculpture in Millennium Park – then this could be it. This stunning site-specific video and sound installation brought more than 65,000 Chicagoans and out-of-town visitors to the Park over a ten day period in the middle of the winter. Luminous Field by Luftwerk became a viral sensation and photos of the beautiful lights and geometrical forms that enveloped ‘the Bean’ were seen throughout the world.” – Dorothy Coyle, Executive Director – Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture

That’s an Amstel Live 2012 video mapping dance interactive visual orgasm act featuring Timor Stephens. HOLY SH*T! Did you see how wonderfully the LED suits were programmed along with the other automated lighting and projections?! I was mesmerized by those suits. I had to find out more – they’re from a company called iLuminate. They’ve been doing light-up suits all over the place! Check out iLuminate’s video reel:

The production company is Tribe Company BV, and the rental company was a subsidiary of PRG, EML Productions Holland. Beautiful work, EML! The dancers are Timor Steffens, Alexandria Kaye, Catalina Paz Rendic Vasquez, Jonathan William Rabon, and Brandon Barton. GREAT work!

I grabbed this image from Tribe Company‘s website of the Amstel Live setup, it’s such a great picture:

GAH! This is AWESOMENESS! Happy Monday, everyone! What an awesome way to start it up!